Should the city ban the open carry of firearms by teenagers? [UPDATED]

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Joe Taylor insists: He’s not a microphone chaser. He doesn’t do politics, and until recently, had never drafted legislation. Taylor is a plaintiff’s attorney with an office downtown. His clients are victims of violent crime. (He himself was robbed and assaulted at age 11, he says.) Like many St. Louisans, Taylor has been worried by all the local TV news videos: Young males, swaggering down city streets in recent months, holding heavy weapons, seemingly unafraid of police stopping them. But what stunned Taylor just as much earlier this year was the related political impasse: Democratic electeds from the area, with police support, went to Jefferson City in hopes of passing what he considered a commonsense ban on unsupervised minors carrying guns on public property. Republicans, who control Jefferson City, united to thwart it.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Taylor says.

So he dug into state law. Years ago, he learned, cities all over Missouri had banned the open carrying of firearms. But the General Assembly grew more conservative and permissive on guns, such that in 2014, it voted to pass a law forcing those cities with bans to make exceptions for folks with concealed-carry permits. Yet that law also set the minimum age for permits at 19, so in effect, it let cities keep a de facto ban on open carry for nearly all teenagers. All the cities had to do was pass new ordinances to comply with the state statute. Kansas City, for example, immediately did this. The president of the police union there told KSDK last week: “We just don’t have an issue with a lot of people walking around obviously carrying weapons that aren’t concealed.”

St. Louis, however, never passed a new ordinance—and since then…well, watch the videos.

Taylor declines to name names, but he says he began calling people in the city who were “in the know” to ask whether law enforcement believed a ban could be a useful tool for officers. “The response was a pretty overwhelming ‘yes,’” Taylor says. (The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department did not respond to a request for comment, but in a recent press release, Chief Robert Tracy said, “It should be prohibited for juveniles to carry guns.”)

Then Taylor considered safety. Could a ban be enforced, he wondered, without harm to citizens or officers? “Because these weapons have been legal for years, this would require a very slow and calculated roll-out,” he says. “I was given assurances that it could be done.” After all, he intended the law as a deterrent, not a punishment: “This wasn’t about turning people into criminals. It was about slowly getting people to leave the guns at home.” Taylor finished his draft.

On the advice of a friend, he pitched it to 8th Ward Alderwoman Cara Spencer, who recently ran for mayor (and may run again). Spencer balked at first, but came around to Taylor’s logic and, in May, filed BB 29. Over the next two months, she accepted various changes, responding to feedback from City Counselor Sheena Hamilton, the police, and other aldermen. Spencer also asked Robert Dierker, a retired circuit judge and constitutional conservative, to opine on whether the final version would survive legal challenges; he wrote that it “most likely” would.

BB 29 would allow officers to approach a young person open-carrying a firearm and ask to see a permit. Anyone under 18 will necessarily not have one (because of ineligibility) and, upon conviction, face a fine of up to $500 or be required to do community service. Those who are over 18 and never got a permit could face some combination of those consequences and/or up to 30 days in jail. As for the guns: Taylor says that as he understands it, the police could seize them as evidence to prove the ordinance violations, and in so doing, could process them—that is, check whether they were stolen, defaced, or used in another crime. In certain cases, the defendant could apply and get the gun back.

In early July, as the aldermen neared the finish line, Blake Strode, executive director of ArchCity Defenders, posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter to oppose the bill. He feared that police could use the new law as “a pretext to stop, question, search, & even kill more young Black men.” But in a letter obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the city counselor had weighed in on that, writing that police “could enforce BB 29 without resorting to unconstitutional stop and frisk policies.”

And indeed, the police’s new powers would come with new responsibilities. They’d need to track the race and gender of those stopped, plus whether a stop resulted in arrest or citation, then compile all of that in an annual report. In addition, the board passed what some alders spoke of as a companion bill, handled by Rasheen Aldridge of the 14th Ward, that would require officers doing certain kinds of searches to hand out business cards identifying themselves. “If we have more enforcement,” Aldridge told me, “we need more transparency as well.”

The extra enforcement wouldn’t quiet the gunfire overnight, Spencer said at the July 14 board meeting. “This is not the solution to gun violence,” she said. “But it is a tool.”

To the extent the tool dries up the stream of sensational gun-toting videos, it could prove useful by allaying fears, says Richard Rosenfeld, distinguished professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “Just think of the media coverage directed at photographs of young people carrying AR-15s openly and the accompanying stories that the police can’t do anything about it,” says Rosenfeld. “I do think it can have a positive effect on perceptions of safety, even if it doesn’t by itself substantially reduce gun violence.”

What would substantially reduce gun violence? The Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank, recently took what it called a “rigorous and transparent” look at the body of scientific gun-policy research. Much was inconclusive because of methodological flaws, Rand found, but there was a  “supportive” evidence base for certain causal relationships: for example, that laws allowing concealed carry tend to increase firearm homicides, whereas laws protecting against child access tend to reduce them.

Missouri cities couldn’t enact the latter or reverse the former right now even if they wanted to; state law preempts them. Sensible Missouri, a new nonprofit, seeks to give them more leeway. Rosenfeld, who is part of the effort, says the group is trying to reinstate local control of gun laws through a ballot initiative campaign. The Supreme Court has left open a menu of options for regulating firearms, he says, and what makes sense in rural areas won’t make sense in St. Louis. Sensible Missouri’s primary principle, according to Rosenfeld, is that such decisions should be made by communities themselves, not by “politicians in Jefferson City.”

Meanwhile, the politics in St. Louis haven’t played out yet on BB 29. The board passed it on July 20, and at press time, it was still awaiting the signature of Mayor Tishaura Jones. She and Spencer fought each other tooth and nail in the 2021 mayor’s race, and a rematch is possible. Jones may want to deny Spencer a win. On the merits, Jones tends to prefer upstream approaches; a spokesman said that her office is reviewing the bill “as well as any safety or operational concerns it could pose to the public and officers.” Yet the bill did pass with the overwhelming support of aldermen, including Jones’ progressive allies, so even if she vetoes it on philosophical grounds, the board may override it. As Alisha Sonnier, alderwoman of the 7th Ward, told the Post-Dispatch: “There was a lot of community that was saying we need to do anything that we possibly can.”

Joe Taylor, for his part, insists that this is not just a downtown problem. Out in the neighborhoods, far from City Hall, he says, teens continue to carry large guns in public. Residents are intimidated. “They don’t sit out on their front porches or go to markets because they see kids with TEC-9s and AR-15s,” says Taylor. “Do we just continue to let children walk around with these very powerful weapons?”

And even while maintaining that he doesn’t do politics, he clarifies: He’s not finished yet. Says Taylor: “I’m going to St. Louis County next with it.”

UPDATE, 8/8: The mayor signed BB 29 into law on August 3. At least one member of the St. Louis County Council is reportedly considering the filing of a similar bill.